Many online computer systems offer listings of goods and services for sale, rent, and reservation (for simplicity, “booking” generally) that have or are associated with real world locations that have intangible value to the prospective consumer. For example, in a given city, certain neighborhoods, and even particular streets are more desirable than others. A consumer factors the location into their decision whether to book a listing. Existing online computer systems that provide bookings rank listings using location, for example, using a radial distance between a given listing and the designated center of a city, or a reference point, such as a tourist attraction, as one consideration in the ranking. While the exact ranking mechanism used by these systems varies, however, incorporating location based strictly on radial distance from fixed reference points into a ranking system carries with it the risk of over or underweighting the location of the booking relative to every other factor in the ranking.
Online accommodations and reservations systems provide a suitable example. Typically, the distance between a listing and a user's location is a factor in ranking listings, and these systems generally sort listing from closest to the user to furthest. For example, a user may decide that four miles for a restaurant reservation is a reasonable distance to travel, but fifty miles is unreasonable. However, if two listings are merely a mile apart, then distance becomes much less predictive of whether a prospective user will book one listing over another. As cities are often on the scale few miles, often mere distance is not a useful distinguishing factor in rankings of listings.